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Reaping the Fruits of Another’s Labor: The Role of Moral Meaningfulness, Mindfulness, and Motivation in Social Loafing

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Abstract

Despite the popularity of teams in universities and modern organizations, they are often held back by dishonest actions, social loafing being one of them. Social loafers hide in the crowd and contribute less to the pooled effort of a team, which leads to an unfair division of work. While previous studies have mostly delved into the factors related to the task or the group in an attempt to explain social loafing, this study will instead focus on individual factors. Accordingly, the aim is to investigate the determinants of social loafing attitudes, namely moral meaningfulness and mindfulness in a university setting. We further examine the relationship between attitudes and intentions and introduce the moderating role of motivation in the attitude–intention link. The findings from a sample of 319 business students reveal that both mindfulness and moral meaningfulness are negatively related to loafing attitudes, while attitudes positively predict social loafing intentions. In addition, we find that extrinsic motivation strengthens the relationship between social loafing attitudes and intentions.

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Notes

  1. In day-to-day discussions we often hear the term “free riding” when describing someone slacking off on team assignments. Social loafing and free riding are similar in that they both entail effort being withheld, i.e., investing less than full effort when performing a task (Bennett and Naumann 2005; Kidwell and Bennett 1993). Loafers put in less effort when working in a group compared to the effort they devote when working individually due to reduced identifiability or evaluation (Latané et al. 1979; Kidwell and Bennett 1993). Free riders enjoy the benefits of belonging to a group while they are simultaneously unburdened by the equivalent costs of providing those benefits. The decision to free ride resides in comparing the benefits of contributing to a group’s goals and the benefits obtained by free riding (Albanese and Van Fleet 1985).

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The authors would like to thank the students who participated in the study.

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  1. Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana, Kardeljeva pl. 17, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Katarina Katja Mihelič & Barbara Culiberg

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Mihelič, K.K., Culiberg, B. Reaping the Fruits of Another’s Labor: The Role of Moral Meaningfulness, Mindfulness, and Motivation in Social Loafing. J Bus Ethics 160, 713–727 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-018-3933-z

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